LXJS 2013 Wrap-Up

LXJS 2013 is the second edition of English conference located in Lisbon, Portugal. LXJS is an all-inclusive single track JavaScript conference spanned on two days.

To keep things short, this wrap up will be a one sentence summary per enlightening session.

Coincidentely, this milestone was my second JavaScript-only conference and my second journey in Lisbon (especially I never came back twice to the same place on my own).

Many people around me left LXJS with a huge smile on their face. And I must admit this edition is a huge success: at curating good speakers, at widening our spectrum of knowledge and most importantly, at providing an opportunity to meet genuine people among the attendees.

interdisciplinaryprogramming.com is the crossroads of the strong academic knowledge (and poor UI/programming skills) and the practical-minded world of Web developers: “Sometimes you just don’t know better.”

Remark: whereas the slideless format could have been disturbing for some folks, this sole sentence is the best piece of wisdom from LXJS. Yet we want to improve our skills and practice, our professional/personal environments are the ones helping us to feel be happy.

How eventually the Node.js Task API will be an easier and more natural guard to implement rather than the cumbersome Domain one.

Nota Bene: on a side note, it is also interesting to compare our startup experiences and noticing there is no much difference in raising a demi-million or several millions of cash to create a product: features don’t bring customers nor money.

Thank You as a gift

I initiated a ritual at Reasons to Be Creative, by offering an instant picture of inspiring people, a portrait of themselves, speaker or not speaker.
A give away on any kind of ownership of the picture, expressing my thankfulness and letting them know this gesture.

As there were really too many people to thank for, I randomly decided to attribute the picture to David Dias, one of the organiser of the conference.

A sort of reward as I really feel enthusiastic thanks to LXJS. Especially as it gave me to think about using npm over bower for frontend package management. I’ll write more about this later, the time to experiment and continue this discussion with some other folks.

What’s next?

I’ll definitely attend LXJS in 2014. And submit a topic or two, especially as 20 minutes is a really good format (oh yes, I think I did not get bored even if I was less interested by some talks — which is a good point).

I was glad to meet a couple of new faces, like Karolis, Vyacheslav (thanks to a retweet ;-)) and Jan.

Finally, here are some hints to provide an even better LXJS 2014:

being on time (especially for the breaks otherwise we are starving)

caring about the duration: 6h of sessions in an afternoon — for a second day, after two parties — is a lot to handle

more time for the lunchbreak (1h is really too short, to eat and to talk)

being clear on the availability of a breakfast or not

a small detail but I had to throw 90% of the goodies except the T-shirt and a couple of stickers, because the rest was redundant (and was not fitting in my travel bag)